Trudeau wisely chooses high road in Trump’s immigration debacle

"For the U.S. and Trump, this is now more than an impasse over immigration, it is a humanitarian crisis, as thousands of kids have been separated from their parents, with some of them being held in cages and many more using sleeping bags on floors."

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In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who’ve been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, stand in line at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP)

There are two good reasons for Justin Trudeau to have told the House of Commons on Monday that “we’re not going to play politics” with the U.S. immigration crisis provoked by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of illegal asylum seekers in which parents in custody have been separated from thousands of children.

First, Canada has its own crisis of illegal border crossings away from normal points of entry. In 2017, more than 20,000 “irregular” asylum claimants were processed, about 90 per cent of them in Quebec, mostly near the border crossing of Lacolle from upstate New York. In the first quarter of 2018, another 6,373 persons were processed after crossing illegally into this country. These asylum seekers have been temporarily domiciled in tent cities, and even the Olympic Stadium last year, before being re-located to Canadian cities.

And then, Trudeau does not need to annoy Donald Trump any more than he already has over trade and tariffs by being sanctimonious over the issue of illegal migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

For the U.S. and Trump, this is now more than an impasse over immigration, it is a humanitarian crisis, as thousands of kids have been separated from their parents, with some of them being held in cages and many more using sleeping bags on floors.

Former first lady Laura Bush took the extraordinary step of publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post, condemning the separation of parents and children as “cruel and immoral” adding that it was “eerily reminiscent of Japanese internment camps of World War II.”

All the living former first ladies — Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rosalynn Carter — quickly joined Bush in denouncing the heartbreaking separation process of migrant children from their parents, and even Melania Trump said that she didn’t like it, either. On moral leadership, make that First Ladies 5, President Trump 0.

John McCain, now the elder Republican statesman of the U.S. Senate, held nothing back in a tweet he posted Monday evening. He termed the situation “an affront to the decency of the American people and contrary to the principles and values upon which our nation was founded.”

And the American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in with a statement terming Trump’s separation policy as “government-sanctioned child abuse,” while the U.S. College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association have also denounced the family separation policy. For good measure, the UN Human Rights Commission said the separations violated human rights.

But Trump was having none of it. “The United States will not become a migrant camp,” he declared Monday. “And it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won’t be.”

The U.S. government said it now has 12,000 children in its care, 10,000 of whom arrived unaccompanied by adults at the border, with another 2,000 who have been put it up in separate detention centres from their parents.

Typically, Trump blamed it on the Democrats when it is his own zero tolerance policy, implemented in April, that’s responsible for the crisis. Trump could defuse the situation with a phone call or an executive order to the Department of Homeland Security, instructing it to end the separation of families while their cases are being heard.

Or perhaps he’s holding that in reserve as a Trump card in deal-making, including Congressional funding for his promised wall along the Mexican border. He was scheduled to meet Congressional Republican leaders on Tuesday, and something may have come of that. One draft Republican compromise bill would give children an eventual path to citizenship while delivering $25 billion in funding for Trump’s wall.

Speaking to a small business audience in Washington at mid-day Tuesday, Trump doubled-down on deporting illegal immigrants without separating families. “We want to solve this problem,” he said. “We want to end this border crisis.”

Meantime, the Trump administration has held to a hard line.

“Parents who entered illegally are by definition criminals,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a White House press briefing late Monday. “By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their own children at risk.”

These are not words that will be inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, alongside “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

From a Canadian perspective, the U.S. illegal migrant crisis offers an opportunity to assess where we have come since Trudeau posted his famous #“WelcomeToCanada” tweet in January 2017, on the heels of Trump’s order banning travel from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Syria, from which Canada had recently welcomed 25,000 refugees.

It can take over a year for asylum claims to be ruled upon by Ottawa. And admission is by no means a given. Of the 20,000 people who entered Canada illegally last year, 8,200 has since been deported, more than half of them involuntarily, with the government footing the bill for their flights home.

Another 30,000 asylum claimants crossed the border at regular points of entry, though under the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., most of them were apparently sent back.

The question some are asking is whether the U.S., under Trump, is still a safe third country. But don’t expect Trudeau to make such a case. He’s got quite enough to do with the NAFTA renegotiation, without trying to score political points on the U.S. border migrant crisis.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.